By modern standards I wouldn't say that a supercomputer is needed to decode h.264 content. Even using Handbrake 0.9.4's High Profile preset (outputting to mkv), there haven't been any issues on my Frankenputer media server - a misbegotten Celeron e1500 with 2 gigs of DDR400 RAM and a Radeon 9800 Pro, running 32-bit Windows Vista Ultimate.
That being said, the decision to abruptly remove DiVX;-) support reeks of high-minded elitism at the expense of user choice, and I don't blame anyone for keeping Handbrake 0.9.3.
...sive disappointment with the world as it is. Rather than work to fix issues with personal appearance and the world at large, a lifetime of video games and distraction - particularly in the world's richest country, where the entertainment industry represents 4% of GDP - have encouraged them to avoid that which makes them uncomfortable, or to gloss over it before heading back to endless diversion.
Having worked in a laboratory, I understand the need to wring life out of ancient equipment. The motherboards on this page may be of some interest to you:
http://www.adek.com/ATX-motherboards.htm
So far I haven't found a Core 2 motherboard with 2 ISA slots anywhere else. The NT 4 drivers will probably work under 32-bit XP, too; I can't vouch for Vista or Windows 7, but this could be a handy piece of information to tuck away somewhere.:) Happy experimenting.
If Intel's OpenGL driver were a food, it would probably be boiled spam, or perhaps a potato soaked in malt vinegar and unceremoniously smashed underfoot before being thrown into a deep fryer and finally coated in chocolate syrup. That explains the performance disparity, and is one reason why Windows leans further toward DirectX every year.
The execution units / shader cores / stream processors are unfortunately misleading. All three companies have different approaches to running shader code; while I don't know what Intel's strategy is, I'm under the impression that the large number of units in ATI's cards makes up for the fact that they run synchronously with the rest of the GPU. By comparison Nvidia has literally componentized its chips, with the "shader core" running dramatically faster than the rest of the chip.
I haven't had the opportunity to use an Intel graphics chip for any longer than a few minutes at a time in 3D, but their biggest problem seems to be driver optimization and quality. According to theoretical benchmarks their x4500 integrated part should be about level with a GeForce 6800 in terms of raw speed, but in practice it's rarely half as fast, and the more demanding the scenario, the greater the degradation in performance becomes.
I'm not sure what OS you're running, but good progress is being made with ffmpeg-mt, a natively multithreaded implementation of the ffmpeg libraries. The ffdshow-mt is equivalent for Windows. A friend of mine has had very good luck with that, and I hope it helps you, too.
This may not help with the silence, but should work fine for 1080p H.264 playback - if all else fails, snagging a passively cooled GeForce 9 card would give you access to VDPAU or accelerated playback through Windows.
S3: The Virge ruined what was previously a very solid reputation. Unable to create decent drivers for subsequent cards (and finally, terminally poisoned by the Savage2000), they were eaten by VIA and eke out an existence creating integrated video chipsets and the occasional low-volume discrete part.
3dfx: From top of the heap to bankrupt and eaten by nVidia in three short years. A valuable cautionary tale in how not to manage ongoing R&D.
Matrox: Respectable and very chic, up to the G400 Max. Fell off the radar for nearly four years, debuted the Parhelia to muted response, now focus on frame grabbers and professional / CAD cards. Last I checked their OpenGL driver still left something to be desired.
There were so many others: Oak Technologies, SiS (bahahahahaha), Trident (see previous parentheticals), Tseng Labs...
Not really true. Their consumer-grade hardware was never much better than middle of the road (and they were infamous for using proprietary parts that you could only buy or replace directly from Compaq), but their workstations and servers were as reliable and well-built as anything else on the market. My friends and I used to joke that they generally hired for the workstation and server design branches, and punished misdoings and underperformance by demoting said designers to the home market.
Which I miss. Honestly, what's better: colorful plastics and designs that have never been seen before, or the computing industry's current Henry Ford-esque quest to prove that "[the customer] can have any color they want, as long as it's black"?
Certainly not. No AMD CPUs prior to the Phenoms support SSE4.x; nor did any Intel chips prior to the 45nm switchover (later Core2 CPUs). MMX, i686, SSE, and SSE2 are the baseline for all AMD64-capable CPUs. Subsequent instruction sets have been added to various architectures in a willy-nilly fashion, and with varying levels of per-clock performance depending upon the chip being discussed. I can't really speak for the utility of putting SIMD code to work in non-multimedia related code, but it seems to be a trend across the board.
And Slackware usually follows a "whenever it's ready or worthwhile" approach. Gaps between releases have ranged from six months to a year on the average.
It's not a question of pompous self-importance - even back when Mac OS 9 was a going concern I've found both characters' visual styles to be kind of insipid and childish. They're just too cutesy for my tastes.
It was a question of legal liability. Apple hunting down individual coders for reverse-engineering its hardware would have been draconian - Apple suing Be, Inc. for reverse-engineering its hardware would be justified under IP law, if not expected.
I know, and back in your day you hardly ever got wood watching TV, and the skies were bluer, and children's smiles were sweeter and more endearing, and nostalgia always reigns supreme.
Wine. Virtualization. Separate computers. Dual-booting.
There are a legion of definitions of success. With any of the above four options, you can have your library of business apps AND enjoy what Linux has to offer. Why make a holy war out of computer operating systems?
I'm not so certain of the validity of that statement any longer. A very large number of non-display x64 drivers certified for Vista and Windows 7 now happily run on XP x64 too, and video card drivers for the platform aren't a problem unless you're using something either very old or esoteric at this juncture. I say this as someone who decided to use all four gigs of his RAM back in February and hasn't run into a single deal-breaking issue with his install since then.:)
And here we see Microsoft making messy and untenable assertions to the detriment of its ostensibly valuable business partners. My charitable side is prone to thinking that these moves are just oblivious on Microsoft's part, but the side that's been reading Slashdot for a decade suggests that they still think they're too big to be affected by their own irked customers... and it's happy to see that notion countered more and more these days. Next slide.
I don't have any personal experience with the game, but are you really concerned about a few mouseclicks before jumping into a game driven almost entirely by mouse-driven activities?
Even Wolf3D wasn't the very first - id published a game under Softdisk called http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catacomb_3-D
>Catacomb 3-D with EGA graphics and Adlib sound in 1991. That was probably the first textbook example of a first-person shooter as it's currently understood. That said, yes, it's stupid and criminal that Wolfenstein's engine didn't make the cut.
Slashdot Mirror
By modern standards I wouldn't say that a supercomputer is needed to decode h.264 content. Even using Handbrake 0.9.4's High Profile preset (outputting to mkv), there haven't been any issues on my Frankenputer media server - a misbegotten Celeron e1500 with 2 gigs of DDR400 RAM and a Radeon 9800 Pro, running 32-bit Windows Vista Ultimate.
That being said, the decision to abruptly remove DiVX ;-) support reeks of high-minded elitism at the expense of user choice, and I don't blame anyone for keeping Handbrake 0.9.3.
...sive disappointment with the world as it is. Rather than work to fix issues with personal appearance and the world at large, a lifetime of video games and distraction - particularly in the world's richest country, where the entertainment industry represents 4% of GDP - have encouraged them to avoid that which makes them uncomfortable, or to gloss over it before heading back to endless diversion.
Sorry, guys, they can't all be funny.
Having worked in a laboratory, I understand the need to wring life out of ancient equipment. The motherboards on this page may be of some interest to you:
http://www.adek.com/ATX-motherboards.htm
So far I haven't found a Core 2 motherboard with 2 ISA slots anywhere else. The NT 4 drivers will probably work under 32-bit XP, too; I can't vouch for Vista or Windows 7, but this could be a handy piece of information to tuck away somewhere. :) Happy experimenting.
If Intel's OpenGL driver were a food, it would probably be boiled spam, or perhaps a potato soaked in malt vinegar and unceremoniously smashed underfoot before being thrown into a deep fryer and finally coated in chocolate syrup. That explains the performance disparity, and is one reason why Windows leans further toward DirectX every year.
Technically Torchlight uses OGRE. :)
The execution units / shader cores / stream processors are unfortunately misleading. All three companies have different approaches to running shader code; while I don't know what Intel's strategy is, I'm under the impression that the large number of units in ATI's cards makes up for the fact that they run synchronously with the rest of the GPU. By comparison Nvidia has literally componentized its chips, with the "shader core" running dramatically faster than the rest of the chip.
I haven't had the opportunity to use an Intel graphics chip for any longer than a few minutes at a time in 3D, but their biggest problem seems to be driver optimization and quality. According to theoretical benchmarks their x4500 integrated part should be about level with a GeForce 6800 in terms of raw speed, but in practice it's rarely half as fast, and the more demanding the scenario, the greater the degradation in performance becomes.
I'm not sure what OS you're running, but good progress is being made with ffmpeg-mt, a natively multithreaded implementation of the ffmpeg libraries. The ffdshow-mt is equivalent for Windows. A friend of mine has had very good luck with that, and I hope it helps you, too.
This may not help with the silence, but should work fine for 1080p H.264 playback - if all else fails, snagging a passively cooled GeForce 9 card would give you access to VDPAU or accelerated playback through Windows.
Just thinking about it makes me misty-eyed...
S3: The Virge ruined what was previously a very solid reputation. Unable to create decent drivers for subsequent cards (and finally, terminally poisoned by the Savage2000), they were eaten by VIA and eke out an existence creating integrated video chipsets and the occasional low-volume discrete part.
3dfx: From top of the heap to bankrupt and eaten by nVidia in three short years. A valuable cautionary tale in how not to manage ongoing R&D.
Matrox: Respectable and very chic, up to the G400 Max. Fell off the radar for nearly four years, debuted the Parhelia to muted response, now focus on frame grabbers and professional / CAD cards. Last I checked their OpenGL driver still left something to be desired.
There were so many others: Oak Technologies, SiS (bahahahahaha), Trident (see previous parentheticals), Tseng Labs...
Not really true. Their consumer-grade hardware was never much better than middle of the road (and they were infamous for using proprietary parts that you could only buy or replace directly from Compaq), but their workstations and servers were as reliable and well-built as anything else on the market. My friends and I used to joke that they generally hired for the workstation and server design branches, and punished misdoings and underperformance by demoting said designers to the home market.
Which I miss. Honestly, what's better: colorful plastics and designs that have never been seen before, or the computing industry's current Henry Ford-esque quest to prove that "[the customer] can have any color they want, as long as it's black"?
Certainly not. No AMD CPUs prior to the Phenoms support SSE4.x; nor did any Intel chips prior to the 45nm switchover (later Core2 CPUs). MMX, i686, SSE, and SSE2 are the baseline for all AMD64-capable CPUs. Subsequent instruction sets have been added to various architectures in a willy-nilly fashion, and with varying levels of per-clock performance depending upon the chip being discussed. I can't really speak for the utility of putting SIMD code to work in non-multimedia related code, but it seems to be a trend across the board.
And Slackware usually follows a "whenever it's ready or worthwhile" approach. Gaps between releases have ranged from six months to a year on the average.
No, no, why am I denied mod points, God, why?!
Or the processor exposes an issue with the OS...
Why is this modded Troll? Other posts suggest that this is a very likely scenario.
There you go. Haven't thought of the Brunching Shuttlecocks in years. Thanks!
It's not a question of pompous self-importance - even back when Mac OS 9 was a going concern I've found both characters' visual styles to be kind of insipid and childish. They're just too cutesy for my tastes.
It was a question of legal liability. Apple hunting down individual coders for reverse-engineering its hardware would have been draconian - Apple suing Be, Inc. for reverse-engineering its hardware would be justified under IP law, if not expected.
I know, and back in your day you hardly ever got wood watching TV, and the skies were bluer, and children's smiles were sweeter and more endearing, and nostalgia always reigns supreme.
Wine. Virtualization. Separate computers. Dual-booting. There are a legion of definitions of success. With any of the above four options, you can have your library of business apps AND enjoy what Linux has to offer. Why make a holy war out of computer operating systems?
The joke, it has gone over your head. Do not despair - you agree with the post at heart. :)
I'm not so certain of the validity of that statement any longer. A very large number of non-display x64 drivers certified for Vista and Windows 7 now happily run on XP x64 too, and video card drivers for the platform aren't a problem unless you're using something either very old or esoteric at this juncture. I say this as someone who decided to use all four gigs of his RAM back in February and hasn't run into a single deal-breaking issue with his install since then. :)
And here we see Microsoft making messy and untenable assertions to the detriment of its ostensibly valuable business partners. My charitable side is prone to thinking that these moves are just oblivious on Microsoft's part, but the side that's been reading Slashdot for a decade suggests that they still think they're too big to be affected by their own irked customers... and it's happy to see that notion countered more and more these days. Next slide.
I don't have any personal experience with the game, but are you really concerned about a few mouseclicks before jumping into a game driven almost entirely by mouse-driven activities?
If I had the mod points, you would benefit richly...
Even Wolf3D wasn't the very first - id published a game under Softdisk called http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catacomb_3-D >Catacomb 3-D with EGA graphics and Adlib sound in 1991. That was probably the first textbook example of a first-person shooter as it's currently understood. That said, yes, it's stupid and criminal that Wolfenstein's engine didn't make the cut.